


The Heart of the Doctor

by SilverDrake



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Episode: s07e05 The Angels Take Manhattan, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-28
Updated: 2013-05-28
Packaged: 2017-12-13 07:11:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/821478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDrake/pseuds/SilverDrake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alternate ending for "The Angels Take Manhattan".<br/>The Doctor and his friends have to deal with the harsh realities of how paradoxes interact with the fabric of the universe and how some times not everything can be fixed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heart of the Doctor

# The Heart of the Doctor

As bright flashes and arcs of energy ripped reality apart to break down the timeline they all had been trapped into, the Doctor broke into a cursing scream.  
River ran through the Winter Quay roof and caught him in her arms as he fell on his knees in the cemetary. It was over.  
But Rory and Amy were nowhere to be seen. River looked around, surprised, for a second, and then turned to the Doctor, the unspoken question in her eyes. In her embrace, his broken breathing was the only answer she needed.  
He struggled to get up, as if he was still seeing both timelines around him. Still seeing them.  
«You should stay away from me,» he said, still looking into a world lost to anyone but him.  
«You know I won't,» she answered, holding tighter.  
«You understand what happened, don't you?» he said, angry and frustrated.  
She did not answer. But she had understood, by now. Only she did not want to think about that.  
«You know, River, this is what we often forget. So many adventures, so many escapades, so many crazy moments when things just fall into place... We forget that one single moment when all those blessed cogs do not engage would be enough to undo us.»  
«And why should we not, my dear? What would we ever do with our lives if we thought of that?»  
«You could be safe, for one.»  
He broke free of her. He did not force himself away, but his body language just made it clear he needed to leave her arms.  
«We never took the time to explain the rules. So many rules,» he said as his voice broke here and there, like an old palace slowly giving in to crumbling foundations. «Physics are complicated enough and there is no end to their study. Time travel... makes physics look like child's play.»  
«Nobody knows all of its rules.»  
«I do!» he cried.  
He was looking away from her, and yet she could imagine every detail and feature of his face distorted into anger and hate directed at himself.  
«I knew them all. I knew what would happen. I just... had no time to explain. Or the heart... Yes, the heart. I did not have to heart to tell them. Or maybe no heart at all. It would not be the first time I have to bear such accusations, would it, River?»  
River thought about something to say. Something that would heal him, lift him from what he was falling into. But she could not. This was the burden of the Time Lords: so much power and knowledge at their hands, and the weight so many consequences on them.  
«Every action has its consequences, dear,» she clumsily tried. «They knew there were risks, they always knew. They saw the universe die, both of them waited for each other for lifetimes.»  
«But they thought they would be saved, this time. And I let them.»  
«Saved can mean many things, dear,» she objected. Still weak, but she may have found something to hold on to. «They are not trapped with the Angels, they are not being used as living batteries in that nightmare. And they are together.»  
«Are they?» he tried to say, and a smal gasp broke through his words.  
«If there is anybody who can know, it is you.»  
He turned around slowly. He still could not focus. Not on River, not on any living thing, and not on the place around him either. Everything was hazy, as if he could not let go of the other world, the one in which he had seen them fall, and that now was...  
«A black hole,» he said, finally looking straight at her.  
«What?»  
She saw the tears in his eyes. And his face. It was not simple anger, or frustration. It was tthe crushing sorrow of guilt, of someone who knew in every detail how deeply he had failed.  
«A black hole, River,» he said. «That is where they are now. A black hole in time, instead of space, but so very near to it. These are the rules. This is why no one should put themselves at the core of a paradox.»  
He took a deep breath, as if he needed a massive effort to take those words out of himself.  
«Each and every paradox breaks the universe. It rips apart a timeline, ties it to another taken from its own course. And creates a hole in the texture of possibilities. Only it cannot be done. It cannot be done because possibilities must exist, they are the building blocks of reality itself.  
«So reality repairs itself. It closes around the rip, it loops on itself just to keep existing. And that is were we get into trouble,» he explained, his voice getting higher and quicker, almost excited.  
«When they jumped, reality started to tear, but could still hold. The only thing that could break it was not the fall, it was their death. True death.»  
«Oh...» River started to say, but the words died into her throat.  
«Yes, River. The paradox really worked in the moment they hit the floor and died. And then the paradox had to sustain itself. Because that is the thing with paradoxes, they cannot work by their own definition.  
«Very few beings in the whole of time and space ever found a way to make paradoxes hold,» he said, and she felt like there was a wave of nostalgia in those worlds, of what she could not say. «So reality created a bubble around them, a black hole in which time cannot pass. Black holes are both cruel and kind in that way. The distortion of time and space means time will never pass for them, holding them in that one last moment for eternity and still feel like an instant to them. The last ever instant of their lives.  
«And I let them make that instant a moment of fear and pain, their bodies breaking and shattering and fear tearing them apart.»  
River watched his hands move around, opening and closing frantically. She felt he would claw away at his own body if she wasn't in front of him, giving him that last tiny bit of restraint. But that was the reason she was with him, the reason why she was meeting that strange and lovely man in all places of space and time. She was meant to be important to him, as he had told the first time they met. That time he had looked so much in love and yet so immensely sad for someone he had just known; or so she thought at the time, before he told her who he really was. Before he told her his name.  
«It was not like that, and you know it, dear.»  
«What do you mean?» he asked, his hands stopping their constant motion.  
He was looking for help, at last, she knew. And maybe he was ready to accept it, to accept that he could not stand alone in the middle of time and space and try to carry it all on his shoulders. Because that was the reason she was with him.  
«You described their last moment. But what do you know, really? You know they loved each other deeply, that they cared up to the very last moment, that they had found themselves again. And that at the very moment they jumped they were not thinking of how it would hurt, of what would happen in that single instant. They were thinking of what would be after.  
«They thought they would live, they would wake up in each other arms as they were during the fall, that the pain would be just a brief moment and that they just had to hold to each other and keep their minds and hearts on that.  
«They may not have felt a thing. Thay may have fallen in hope. A hope that now lasts forever.»  
He was not healed, she could see it. Maybe he never would be. But what she could see was the seed of doubt behind his eyes. She moved towards him and embraced him to feel his breath relaxing, his hearts pound slower and slower until they stabilized. Only his voice now betrayed the slow, dull pain still runninng through his veins.  
«Hope and serenity forever, you say. How I wish that was true.»  
«It may be true, my love, it may,» she said.  
She put a hand on his hair and drove their foreheads to touch.  
«It may be if you believe they loved and had faith in each other truly, if you believed that that love was the one thing they were looking for.»  
«That bears another question entirely,» he said, wary thoughts still haunting his voice.  
«Yes, it does,» she simply answered.  
They held to each other among the graves.


End file.
